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"Welcome and Overview of Sessions, April 26."
The Mathematical Sciences' Role in Homeland Security: Proceedings of a Workshop.
Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2004.

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OCR for page 5
Peter Bicke!
"Opening Remarks," April 26
Transcript of Remarks
Summary of Remarks
Video Presentation
Peter Bickers research spans a number of areas. In his work on semiparametric models (he is a
co-author of the recent book Efficient and Adaptive Estimation for Semiparametric Models), he
uses asymptotic theory to guide development and assessment of such models. He has also
studied hidden Markov models, which are important in such diverse fields as speech recognition
and molecular biology from the point of view of how well the method of maximum likelihood
performs. Recently he has become involved in developing empirical statistical models for
genomic sequences. He is a co-author of the text Mathematical Statistics: Basic Ideas and
Selected Topics. He is past president of the Bernoulli Society and of the Institute of Mathematical
Statistics, a MacArthur fellow, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and
of the National Academy of Sciences.
.~..~ ~:~

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DR. BICKEL: Ladies and gentlemen, I think we had
better get started. As usual we are running a little bit
late, but that is fine.
Welcome. I am Peter Bickel. I am Chair of the
Board on Mathematical Sciences and Applications of the
National Research Council, a Board whose charge in part is
to see what the mathematical sciences can do for the nation
and of course, also, what the nation can do for the
mathematical sciences.
When we proposed this workshop it was just 2
months after September 11, and we and most mathematical
scientists in common with our fellow citizens want to help
protect our country against terrorism.
We realized that although the mathematical
sciences play a key role in most of the defenses that could
be mounted against terrorism this was not appreciated by
most of our fellow mathematical scientists, as well as many
of the agencies working on homeland security.
So, we decided to try to do something about the
situation, and with the generous assistance of the DOE, the
National Science Foundation, National Security Agency, the
Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Office of Naval
Research and DARPA and Microsoft we have convened this
workshop.
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So, what is the element that makes the
mathematical sciences have a central role? Preventing or
minimizing the effect of terrorist activity requires
learning as much as possible about future terrorist plans
or about the nature of a current terrorist attack.
Mathematics, operations research statistics and
computer science provide the fundamental tools for
extracting relevant information from the flood of data of
all types that our senses receive.
We want to know about people moving, money
moving, materials moving and so on. This data may be in the
form of numbers and text that is then subject to the
techniques known under the names of data mining or
unsupervised learning or pattern recognition.
That is the subject of this first session. The
data may be in the form of voice messages or video images
corrupted by noise, and it is then subject to mathematical
techniques which extract the true sounds or images from the
corrupted form in which it is received. That is largely
the subject of Session Three.
Information bearing on what may happen often
comes from several sources simultaneously, for instance,
modern communications, zone images, intelligence data.
Putting such data together is the subject of Session Five.
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Terrorists can encrypt their communications, and
we need to decrypt them. Conversely you want them not to
know about our knowledge and actions. That is the subject
of Session Four.
Finally in the domain of biothreats we may be
faced not with isolated cases but with full-blown epidemics
of unknown origin. Stopping these and tracing their origin
as quickly as possible on the basis of information gleaned
from the pathogens, geography, speed of transmission, etc.,
is the subject of Session Two.
Of course, there is a great deal of overlap
between the subjects in these sessions. The synergy
achieved by bringing these different groups of researchers
together is also one of our goals.
We have been fortunate that a collection of
distinguished speakers with expertise in each of these
areas agreed to give expository talks, that a number of
distinguished mathematical scientists not working in these
areas have agreed to act as discussants, and that a number
of distinguished officers of the federal agencies concerned
with homeland security have agreed to chair these sessions.
As you see we have left plenty of time for
discussion. We hope that these discussions will lead to
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future research and contributions by the mathematical
science community to these questions
.
I encourage the various federal agency
representatives, I am glad to see are in attendance to help
point the way towards this future work
I hope and expect to see two goals achieved,
appreciation by mathematical scientists of the important
contributions that they make to homeland security and
appreciation by the federal agencies of the important role
of the mathematical scientists in the campaign for homeland
security.
I will now turn to the chair of the first
session, Jim S chat z
.
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Welcome and Overview of Sessions
Peter Bicke!
Dr. Bicke! welcomect the participants to the workshop anct spoke about how important it
is for both the mathematics community anct the security community to uncterstanct anct
appreciate the role that the mathematical sciences play in security. Mathematics,
operations research, statistics, anct computer science provide the fundamental tools for
extracting relevant information from the flood of data of all types that our senses receive.
The techniques to be ctiscussect are used to search and sort data, stop and trace disease
outbreaks, extract true data from a message complicated by noise, encrypt and decrypt
messages, and pull together data from disparate sources.
Dr. Bicke] mentioned how fortunate we were to have such a ctistinguishect group of
participants and said that he hoped the discussions Doubt react to future research and
contributions by the mathematical science community to questions cleating with security.
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